Champions League Comes Before Domestic Ones for Some Top Clubs

PARIS — One of the great, if occasionally confusing, aspects of European soccer is the sheer number of opportunities that exist for someone — anyone — to win something. It has not gotten so bad that associations are handing out participation trophies (yet), but in many of the big soccer countries, so many competitions run concurrently in any given season that it can sometimes feel like an exercise in memorization to simply keep track of them all.

Is this game in the league? The cup? Perhaps the League Cup? And would you rather be champions of the league or champions of the Champions League? Knowing a team’s priorities can be just as difficult as knowing its various schedules, since traditional nationalism (that is, putting the domestic title first) often clashes with the economic reality of prioritizing success in Europe.

The simplicity of Paris St.-Germain, then, is a welcome reprieve. The French champions began their Champions League group stage play at home against the Swedish club Malmo on Tuesday night and, strange as it might sound, there is no question that victories like P.S.G.’s 2-0 triumph are — in the bigger picture — far more important than any league game they will play over the next few months.

In many ways, it is the same for Manchester City in England, which lost, 2-1, to Juventus of the Italian league. And for Germany’s Bayern Munich, who will play Olympiakos in Greece on Wednesday. For these three clubs, domestic success would be great, lovely, fantastic. But this season, for them, will be defined by what happens in European competition.

Even Laurent Blanc, the professorial coach of P.S.G., conceded this week that his club needs to have loftier goals. P.S.G. was bought by wealthy Qatari investors in 2011 and, since then, has captured three straight Ligue 1 titles, a French Cup and two League Cup trophies. But it has not made it past the quarterfinals of the Champions League.

Blanc, who has felt pressure from the club’s chairman, Nasser al-Khelaifi, was only stating the obvious when he said: “Paris want to win the Champions League, as every big club does. Of course, Paris have not won this competition yet, but they will some day. When? I don’t know. But the Champions League is a crucial competition for the club.”

Thiago Silva, the team’s captain, was more blunt. He was quoted earlier this year by the Italian newspaper La Gazzetta dello Sport as saying, “We want to win Ligue 1 as quickly as possible to be able to concentrate on our principle objective: the Champions League.” Such candor might not have been welcomed by Blanc, but it was at least honest; Khelaifi’s installation at P.S.G. came with an implied mandate to achieve greater global exposure, and the Champions League is the place to do it.

Manchester City’s situation is largely the same. Competition in England’s Premier League is certainly on a higher level than that of Ligue 1 (making it not nearly as easy to slough off), but the money poured into City by Abu Dhabi investors in 2008 came with a demand similar to that imposed on P.S.G. City’s players and coaches have delivered on many levels — the club won the Premier League in 2012 and 2014 — but the team has not won a single knockout-round match in the Champions League.

City’s manager, Manuel Pellegrini, has generally refused to acknowledge this drought — he stuck to the one-day-at-a-time mantra leading up to Tuesday’s Juventus match — but Vincent Kompany, City’s veteran captain, was less nuanced when asked about how the team might react after being eliminated by Barcelona in the round of 16 last season.

“It is not just losing to Barcelona — we have not handled most of our games in the Champions League well,” Kompany said. “It is really important we make a statement in Europe.”

He said others had been making the same point about City for three or four years.

“As long as we don’t perform in the Champions League as we have in the Premier League,” Kompany said, “there will always be something left behind.”

That is the feeling in Munich, too. There, the focus is more singular — Pep Guardiola, who led Barcelona to such glory from 2008 to 2012, is in his third season at Bayern Munich after having been routed in the semifinals of the Champions League the past two springs.

Guardiola took over after Jupp Heynckes led Bayern Munich to the Champions League title in 2013, and while Guardiola’s two straight Bundesliga trophies are wonderful, for him this season — perhaps his last with the team — is about Europe.

He has even said as much, telling reporters that “only the treble counts” in terms of success in Germany, a reference to winning the league, the German Cup and the Champions League in the same season. Thomas Müller, the team’s star striker, said it, too: “The main objective is — and remains — winning the Champions League.”

For Bayern, and for P.S.G. and Manchester City, the measure of their mettle will not come against domestic rivals this season. Rather, it will come against unusual opponents, some big and some small, from Sweden and Italy and Greece and elsewhere. It will come on Tuesdays and Wednesdays instead of on weekends. It will come under the lights of the Champions League instead of in the league or the cup or the League Cup.

In all likelihood, then, if all goes well, it will ultimately come at the expense of one another.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page B13 of the New York edition with the headline: Domestic Success Takes a Back Seat . Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe